Sarah Gerwig-Moore has penned a piece, “What American legal education can learn from the ‘Harry Potter’ series”
She writes..
Yet that’s the whole point of clinical education and externships. Law students will have to practice at some point, and they can either begin to do so while in law school or after graduation. Bar rules allowing provisional student practice under supervision are meant to allow for learning with the safety net of a licensed attorney. Clinical and externship programs requiring supervised practice contemplate the risks of unauthorized law practice and of entering the legal profession with no client experience. It is true that administering law clinics involves additional costs beyond those required in a traditional podium course.
Law faculty already have ample work without additional litigation responsibilities, and it is potentially dangerous to entrust a law student with a client’s important legal matter. But is it sensible or appropriate to entrust clients’ legal matters to a recent law graduate whose education consisted only of 1/15 hands-on legal training? Practice is what we must do before we practice, and law students need more opportunities and guidance before they graduate and sit for the bar exam.
This lighthearted comparison to the Harry Potter stories can perhaps join other voices to help make a serious and important case for practical legal education. There are few principled reasons for not requiring more hands-on experiences while in school; financial realities are difficult for law schools and have been for years, but finances cannot be the primary driving force of pedagogy. After all, Dumbledore, another key character from the Harry Potter novels, reminds us, there are times “when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.”
Read the full piece at http://www.abajournal.com/voice/article/what-american-legal-education-can-learn-from-the-harry-potter-stories
